Swimming Lessons(41)

“Because we barely know each other,” she said, and shoved at him. A family sitting near them—a mother, father and two young girls—were eating sandwiches and staring. “What?” Flora shouted and the parents turned away, busying themselves with blowing sand off fallen grapes. When she looked at Richard again, he had slipped his feet into his shoes and was standing up.

“I’m going back to the house.” He waited, then said, “I don’t think this is working.”

She was aware of his Converse trainers, black with white laces, on the periphery of her vision.

“See you later, then,” he said.

She clenched her jaw. The shoes stayed a couple of seconds longer, and when she didn’t reply they disappeared from view.





Chapter 22


THE SWIMMING PAVILION, 12TH JUNE 1992, 4:30 AM


Dear Gil,

After our meetings with the dean, you insisted we drive back to the Swimming Pavilion. You checked that I was well, kissed my tight-stretched skin, and went to your room to write. I didn’t mind: I wanted you to finish your novel; we needed the money. I stood at the window and watched the light wink out in your room and thought you should get some rest—what was the point in both of us being awake? A period-like cramping pain came, low in my back, nothing I couldn’t cope with. It passed. Another arrived twenty minutes later when I was in the kitchen getting a glass of water; I bent over the sink and hummed with my teeth clamped together. It faded and I brewed a pot of tea, sitting at the table in the unlit kitchen to drink it, thinking how it was impossible and ridiculous that I had grown a human being inside me and soon it would arrive, fully formed, from my body. The next pain came as I stood up, so that I had to clutch at the back of a kitchen chair to stop myself from dropping to my knees. “Gil!” I called through gritted teeth. “Gil!”

I used the toilet and returned to the bedroom, curling on my side under the covers and kicking them off when the pains gathered strength. I didn’t want to move; if I lay there for long enough they might go away. It was too soon to have a baby—I wasn’t ready, I wouldn’t ever be ready. But the bursts of pain made me arch, cry out, and struggle from the bed. A few minutes before six, when the sky was lightening and I was on all fours on the bathroom floor, my waters broke with a pop. I crawled along the hall too afraid to stand; if I stood, the baby would fall out of me. Still on my knees I opened the front door and sitting on my bottom levered myself down the three steps to the path. That was where you found me.

“Why didn’t you shout?” you said. “Why didn’t you come and get me?” You helped me up, took me into the bedroom, put a nightie over my head. “Have you phoned anyone? Have your waters broken? Ingrid, we’re going to have a baby. He’s coming.”

“I don’t want to do this,” I said before another contraction overtook me. “I’ve changed my mind. I’m meant to be travelling with Louise. I was meant to get a degree.”

“You’re going to be an amazing mother. It’ll be wonderful. I know it.” You tried to prise my fingers from where they were clamped around your forearm, turning the skin white.

“Don’t go,” I cried. “Please don’t go.” I was being dragged under again, tossed upside down and scraped along the bottom.

“A minute, Ingrid,” you may have said. “I’ll just be a minute.”

There was the sound of someone screaming and there was pain, and when I was dumped on dry land there was exhaustion.

You held a bowl for me and pulled my hair out of my face while I sat on the edge of the bed and threw up. Your red hands smelled of soap. I wondered if you’d been a surgeon in a previous life.

“Can you stand?” you said after you’d wiped my mouth. “We need to go now.” You had hold of my elbow, guiding me upwards, but the wave came again, a tsunami of pain that picked me up and tossed me. I must have climbed onto the bed, pressing my face into the pile of blankets and pillows at one end. “Ingrid,” I remember you saying before a groan, deep and guttural, escaped.

“Fuck off,” I said into the pillows; then I was on my back, pushing and panting, and you were looking between my legs and smiling.

“I can see him, Ingrid,” you said. “He has dark hair.”

“She,” I said in between strains.

“Whichever. It doesn’t matter. It’s here.”

“I don’t know how to do this. I can’t do it!” I could hear myself shouting in panic, and with a searing red-hot pain the head was delivered.

“Wait,” you said. “Breathe, she’s turning, she’s coming.” And with one final heave, the baby was out. You scooped her up, put her over your knee, and smacked her tiny blue bottom until she cried and pinkened. She was your colouring—dark hair, her skin brown next to mine. At some point while I was under or resting you’d fetched clean towels from the airing cupboard and a bowl of hot water. You wrapped her so only her face was showing. “We’ve got a girl,” you said, kissing me, putting the baby in my arms, and wiping damp hair from my face. Our daughter was as plump and creased as a shar-pei. Her eyes were glassy and looked straight through us. “The first,” you said. And I laughed; I felt hysterical.

The midwife arrived an hour later, bumping a wheeled tank of gas and air up the veranda steps. The placenta had been delivered, the cord cut, and you were holding Nanette in your arms.